Hacker News Reader

Comment by skylark | Hacker News Reader

Significant whitespace is great for technical interviews - you don't need to worry about matching brackets and whatnot. No brackets also means you have some more vertical space to work with on the whiteboard.

Beyond that, if your interviewer is fluent in python, list comprehensions can greatly shorten the amount of boilerplate you have to write.

View on HN

Amusingly, significant whitespace is the one reason I don't like using Python in whiteboard interviews - my handwriting is far from excellent on a board, and I don't want any ambiguity when reading my control flow.

I'll definitely second the list comprehension point, though. Between that and pleasant string support, a lot of standard interview answers are maybe 50% as long in python as Java. Not easier, necessarily, but faster to write and cleaner to read.

Indentation is a pretty good thing to practice for whiteboards. A lot of people have a tendency to waste more and more space on the left as they go. It's a pretty easy thing to fix, just do some questions and have someone there to correct you whenever you start doing it.

Even if you aren't using python, it will give you more room to work (the other part of this is divide the board before you start).

Yeah, I definitely suffer from that rightward drift, which I suppose I should work on. Somehow I never thought to divide the board, that's an easy improvement!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com